Only a couple of weeks until our departure… you’d think we’d be filled with excitement at this stage. There is excitement, but it’s drowned out with stress and frustration! The Africa holiday concept began to evolve around 2 years ago; with much careful planning, our itinerary was finalised in July ‘07. Early ‘08 is when that itinerary began to fall apart. It wasn’t until the 3rd Jan (I was bed-ridden the 2 days prior) that I checked my emails and discovered the civil unrest in Kenya, our first destination, raising concerns as to whether we proceed to travel there. Usual story from travel insurance…. won’t cover us for riots/civil disorder.
While tossing around our Kenya options, we were informed on 7th Jan that our tour in South Africa had been cancelled due to not meeting minimum numbers; begin chaos mode. Every night after work was spent in front of the computer screen researching alternative options. Having a tour before and a tour afterwards gave us hard limits on either end of our ‘gap’ to be filled. Whenever an option came up with an itinerary we liked and appropriate dates…. no availabilities! Often those were the only dates that weren’t available, with all other departure dates having plenty of availabillity…. just adding to the frustration of it all. There had to be a degree of patience in order to get responses on availabilities and whether the options were guaranteed to go ahead. After a few days we’d been given an option by our travel agent that fit in, and we had come up with two of our options that did not quite fit in, but could be messily possible by chopping days off tours where neccessary. Thus far we have chosen one of our own alternatives and are just narrowing down the adjustments that will be required. It looks like we have almost picked up all the pieces and will have a full trip itinerary once again. Now our attention reverts back to Kenya, which had begun to settle but appears to be firing up again this week.
Meanwhile I have heard back from my travel insurance who has declined my application to have pre-existing medical conditions covered…. well that’s just peachy! So now I’m back to the doctors to have forms filled out to apply with other insurers.
Apart from all this, I’ve been rushing around renewing accounts and licences that are due to expire while I’m away, organising medicines to take away, buying the last of our travel gear to take away, and applying for atm cards etc that will work in Africa. The hidden costs involved in the trip were significantly underestimated. Vaccinations for example, were a lot more expensive than anticipated. Still a few other things to get organised over the next couple of weeks and plenty of stuff to get done at work before I can leave… looks like I’ll be working overtime *sigh*
